Simone Parisi

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I am a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Alberta working with Prof. Michael Bowling and Prof. Matthew E. Taylor. Before joining UoA, I was a postdoctoral researcher at Meta AI Research working with Prof. Abhinav Gupta. I received my PhD in Computer Science from the Technical University of Darmstadt working with Prof. Jan Peters, and my MSc degree in Computer Science Engineering from the Polytechnic University of Milan under the supervision of Prof. Marcello Restelli.

My research interests lie in the area of reinforcement learning, especially in the fields of exploration, representation learning, transfer learning, policy search, and multi-objective optimization. Recently, I have been working on learning under partial observability and on methods that move away from the classic tabula-rasa paradigm towards a more practical transfer framework. More specifically, I am interested in (1) better understanding state representation learning from rich and diverse inputs, (2) developing task-agnostic exploration policies, and (3) developing policy architectures for transfer/continual learning of state representations and exploration policies. You can find more details about my research here.


Selected Papers

Beyond Optimism: Exploration With Partially Observable Rewards
Simone Parisi, Alireza Kazemipour, Michael Bowling
Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2024

Monitored Markov Decision Processes
Simone Parisi, Montaser Mohammedalamen, Alireza Kazemipour, Matthew E. Taylor, Michael Bowling
International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS), 2024

The (Un)Surprising Effectiveness of Pre-Trained Vision Models for Control
Simone Parisi*, Aravind Rajeswaran*, Senthil Purushwalkam, Abhinav Gupta
International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2022

Long-Term Visitation Value for Deep Exploration in Sparse Reward Reinforcement Learning
Simone Parisi, Davide Tateo, Maximilian Hensel, Carlo D'Eramo, Jan Peters, Joni Pajarinen
Algorithms, 2022

Interesting Object, Curious Agent: Learning Task-Agnostic Exploration
Simone Parisi*, Victoria Dean*, Deepak Pathak, Abhinav Gupta
Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2021

TD-Regularized Actor-Critic Methods
Simone Parisi, Voot Tangkaratt, Jan Peters, Mohammad Emtiyaz Khan
Machine Learning, 2019

Multi-objective Reinforcement Learning through Continuous Pareto Manifold Approximation
Simone Parisi, Matteo Pirotta, Marcello Restelli
Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR), 2016

Reinforcement Learning vs Human Programming in Tetherball Robot Games
Simone Parisi, Hany Abdulsamad, Alexandros Paraschos, Christian Daniel, Jan Peters
International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2015